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Strict Urls vs Relative Urls for SEO

I would like to know what is the best for SEO purpose: strict urls or relative urls?

I am not sure, some people say that strict urls are good for SEO because it gives the advantage to optimize the domain name "keyworded" repeated in all urls. Some other people say that relative urls are easier to work with.

Could you please tell me what is the best urls setup and why?

Thank you

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

The conventional SEO theory is that keywords in the URLs help boost your rankings. If you are naming your pages properly, your will have keywords in a relative URL. You doesn't do anything to add sub-directories and long URLs stuffed with keywords.

Matt Cutts has said that keywords in the URL only have a small effect on rankings. I think every little bit helps, but it is easy to go overboard and make your URLs look spammy.

I tend to use full URLs when I work on a site on a Microsoft server due to the lack of ability to set a standard URL using the .htaccess file.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin

If your site is on a Microsoft server and do not have a URL rewriter installed, you would want to use strict or full URLs to avoid the double indexing problems that sometimes happen when the server allows both www subdomain URLs and non www URLs. That would give you some SEO benefit. But there isn't any additional benefit if you are on a Linux server and the site is properly configured to force a standard version of the URL because the benefit is already built into the site.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin

Thanks Guys I have always used the strict/full url when I added a url because I never new that there was any other way. The only time I see the url shortened is like at the forums when it does it for you. Like here. I just started to use the short urls at twitter for the first time with my new site because I had to. I made them long to see if it would help as a test and it seems to be working

I always *ALWAYS* use absolute URLs when linking internally on a site and NEVER use relative URLs.

Always use absolute links whenever you can. If you use relative links you can suddenly lose all of your rankings in the search engines–it has happened to me and was a nightmare for a few weeks until I got it all straightened out. All of a sudden one of my prized domain names stopped ranking in Google. I couldn’t figure it out. Great rankings for several years and bad rankings all of a sudden. I finally searched for the domain name in Google and found that they had indexed the entire site without the www subdomain.
I then found that there were a few links to the non-www version of the site. I figured out that because there were links to mydomain.com and because I was using relative links the search engine were allowed to spider the site thinking it was mydomain.com and not www.mydomain.com. Suddenly Google chose mydomain.com and threw out www.mydomain.com–thus my bad rankings. I fixed all of the relative linking on the site and made sure all the internal links went to www.mydomain.com/page.html and not page.html. After about two to three weeks I finally got back my search engine rankings back. As a result, I will never use relative linking again.

I agree with Bill that its always a good idea when your site does not force a standard URL with a 301 redirect, either with or without the www subdomain. What drives that problem is when users link to your site using both http://www.mydomain.com and http://mydomain.com, as Bill pointed out. If your site does not force a standard for the URL, it can become double indexed.

Some sites, such as WordPress, automatically force the use of a standard with a 301 redirect. They also use absolute URLs.

If your site is on a Microsoft server, you are probably experiencing this problem to one degree or another. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you can set a standard in there, but that only deals with any issues that GoogleBot might run into.

There is another SEO benefit with using absolute URLs, especially when you use contextual links to other articles in your site. I've seen numerous situations where scrapers swiped an article, but because the article has a contextual link to another article in the site, the site picked up a backlink from the scraper site. That doesn't happen with relative URLs. One guy swiped an article from one of my sites that had an Amazon affiliate link embedded in the page. I still see sales from that tracking ID, even though I have not used that particular tracking ID for almost two years.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin